Thoughts & Theory
Content
1. What is history?
2. Why is studying history important?
3. History does not repeat.
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What is history?
And how might history teachers help secondary school students* develop a thoughtful answer to this question?
* Please note that the approach suggested below may work best with upper level students. One may not want to confuse younger students unneccessarily. Chronology and narrative are, despite their pitfalls, inevitable elements of history teaching. Especially lower achieving students will benefit greatly from history presented as interesting stories. Effective history teaching with stories does of course not mean that one would abandon the teaching of proper history (as outlined below); the story needs to remain a means to an end (teaching history), rather than an end in itself (entertaining the students).
by Michael Anklin
Introduction
Those who have never seriously wrestled with the question of what history is in the manner in which most professional historians are likely to have done at some point in their career may consider it a very simple inquiry.
Thus, when a teacher asks this question in class, the average secondary school student—provided she has hitherto not given the question much thought—might answer, “the past” or “what happened in the past”.
This answer is not necessarily incorrect, since a general societal perception of the past, or of what happened in the past, certainly makes up a part of what history is.
But the answer is ultimately incorrect for three main reasons:
1. Dinosaurs
If students believe that history is “what happened in the past”, particularly younger pupils may think history includes everything since the Big Bang or the events described in any religious origin story.
Yet, the type of history studied in history classes is only concerned with human history since the advent of human writing systems (or at least the appearance of human writing systems of cultures that have since been discovered, preserved, and successfully translated).
Without written sources (in the case of more recent history, sources also include filmed footage, audio recordings, and testimonies of surviving eyewitnesses), historians are unable to study history.
What happened before the appearance of known writing systems is usually considered prehistory and is studied by archeologists and paleontologists, among others.
Naturalists or natural historians, working in the field of natural history, investigate how nature has developed over time.
However, aside from a few possible lessons a history teacher might teach primary school pupils at the very beginning of their history studies, prehistory and natural history are separate academic fields of inquiry and do not concern us here.
2. It is incomplete
The answer “what happened in the past” does not take into consideration how, why, and by whom something was recorded; and who considers what relevant today and for what reason. The section farther below focuses on how a Socratic inquiry might help address such issues in the classroom.
3. Teleology might be lurking with intent
The idea that history is “what happened in the past” potentially reinforces a teleological view of history—the idea that “history” equals objectively observable past events that took place on a linear timeline moving toward progress and a better future, and that these events had to take place more or less in the way they did as part of humankind’s journey toward a better present.
Teleology is particularly misleading and potentially dangerous when it is appropriated by right-wing nationalists. They often attempt to locate in a present-day nation-state the spirit of an “eternal nation” whose mythical essence supposedly has its roots in the middle ages or even in antiquity, despite the fact that most modern states were founded in the eighteenth-, nineteenth- or twentieth century.
While some of the citizens of any present-day nation-state will have ancestors who centuries ago lived in the same area of the world where the present state is located, these ancestors lived in city-states, kingdoms, empires, principalities, duchies, baronies, etc.; spoke languages mostly unintelligible to contemporary citizens; had cultural practices that would appear strange to their present-day descendants; and were around 80% illiterate peasants. The concept of a nation-state never occurred to any of them. And just because a nation-state exists today in an area of the world where other states existed before, the latter did not inevitably have to lead to the former. National myths may play a somewhat important part in ensuring a degree of national cohesion among citizens of a nation-state in the present, but they are not history.
In his analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings about history, the renowned French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault wrote,
The forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts. They do not manifest in successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction is not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular randomness of events.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 88.
I return to Foucault’s—and by extension Nietzsche’s—point again in the post “History does not repeat” below. For now, I will say that I usually “translate” Foucault’s above statement for students as “history is a series of accidents,” which I believe makes Foucault’s point sufficiently clear.
But first, let us return to how Socratic questioning might help students think beyond history as “what happened in the past”.
Trying to answer the question via Socratic class discussion
What is the Socratic method?
The instructor keeps asking questions, pointing out what any given student answer may not explain satisfactorily and asks as many open-ended questions as necessary and/or feasible to get students to think more deeply about the issue for themselves. Such an approach will hopefully yield a workable answer, while at the same time remind students that there are always more questions that could be asked and more and different answers to be found.
In class, this can be done as a plenary discussion or as a group exercise.
As a group exercise
If it is done as a group exercise, one might structure it using successive “rounds”.
During the first round, each group receives a sheet of paper with the first question (see questions below in the General Structure) on it.
Group members then have to discuss the question among themselves and come up with an answer. They write down the answer and show it to the teacher. Once they have answered the question satisfactorily, they will get to move on to the next round: they get another sheet of paper with the next question to answer, etc.
To make sure each student participates, one could have the number of group members correspond to the number of questions. Each group member would then have to write down an answer in each round. Since the questions become progressively more complicated, one could have the weaker students write down the answers to the initial, easier questions, and have the stronger students write down the answers to the later, more difficult questions—Although, hopefully, all group members would participate in discussing each question at each stage.
If a group provides more advanced answers early on, they can skip rounds.
This exercise provides an opportunity to implement peer learning and/or differentiated instruction:
If one uses mix ability groups, the weaker students in the group will benefit from the stronger ones during group discussion. If one separates groups according to academic ability, the stronger groups will finish more quickly and can be given further work, while the weaker groups have more time to finish their work.
One could also send individual members of the stronger groups to help the weaker groups, once the stronger groups have finished.
The General Structure
Stage I:
These are basic questions which for the most part will not require students to take further cognitive steps. As such, they are mostly “what?” and “who?” questions.
Question 1:
“What is history?”
The objective of this discussion round is to get to this or a similar answer:
“History is the past.” or “History is what happened in the past.”
Question 2:
“How do we know what happened in the past?”
The objective of this discussion round is to get to this or a similar answer:
“We know from history books.”
Question 3:
“Who wrote those history books?”
The objective of this discussion round is to get to this or a similar answer:
“Historians wrote those books.” This may take a while. To get to “historians”, one may need to introduce the concept of a historian first.
Stage II:
Question 4:
“How do historians know what happened in the past?”
The objective of this discussion stage is to get to this or a similar answer:
“They know from what other people wrote.”
Question 5:
“And how did those people know? How did and does anyone know what happened?”
The first objective of this discussion stage is to get to this or a similar answer:
“They know what happened from what was recorded and/or was left behind by people in the past.”
The second objective of this discussion stage is to get to this or a similar answer:
Understanding the difference between primary and secondary sources, which may of course require an entire separate lesson or two.
Stage III:
At this final stage, students have to engage in critical thinking and question methods, motives, and reliability; and understand that there is often more than one correct answer.
One may want to spend more time discussing the questions at this stage, potentially several lessons, and use additional material, including actual primary sources which students can compare and contrast.
Questions 6 & 7:
“How do historians decide which historical records are accurate and relevant?”
and
“Can we trust their judgement?”
The objective of these questions is no longer necessarily to get to one answer, but, ideally, students will understand the following:
A trained historian has studied her research subject in depth and will thus be able to make an informed judgement about the accuracy and the relevance of a primary source.
A trained historian will compare and contrast a primary source with other primary sources and with secondary sources to decide whether a primary source is accurate or relevant.
A trained historian works in keeping with the ethical standards of the historical profession which demand that a historian only present an argument about a historical issue once she has collected and analyzed as many relevant primary and secondary sources as possible to support this argument and has neither omitted pertinent information nor fabricated evidence.
Once a trained historian submits her findings in draft form to an academic publisher who may publish them as an academic journal article or a book, other trained historians will peer review her writings in compliance with the same ethical and quality standards according to which she has conducted her research. If (usually) two out of three reviewers agree that those standards have not been met, the findings are not published. If subpar work is published anyway, or an academic history book or journal article is later found to be seriously wanting, its author’s career as a historian may be in jeopardy.
Therefore, one may assume that the information in most academic history books published by academic publishers is relatively accurate (except when it isn’t, which the next questions addresses).
Question 8:
“Why is it still important to question supposed ‘historical truth’, despite the training and ethical standards of professional historians?”
Again, the objective here is no longer to get to one right answer, but, ideally, students will understand the following:
Detailed sources do not exist about every historical period. Hence, there will always be a lot we do not know.
Historians are only human; sometimes there are so many sources that one cannot possibly study or consider them all. So, one has to pick and choose.
Historians make mistakes. They might unintentionally overlook something important or inadvertently misunderstand or misinterpret something.
Most importantly:
Historians can never argue from a position of absolute objectivity. They are always influenced by the societal and cultural norms of the world in which they live and by political and economic forces that shape this world and thus affect the personal points of view of any historian.
Unfortunately, these points of view have always included and often still include racist, xenophobic, sexist, ethnocentric and other discriminatory notions that have distorted and still distort historical findings and arguments.
Nonetheless, it is very important for students to understand that this does not mean that historical facts are up for grabs and that it’s anyone’s guess what really happened, or that most historians have nefarious motives and purposely hide “the Truth”.
Social media and Hollywood have in the past decades contributed enough to the spread of mostly inaccurate and counterproductive conspiracy theories. History teachers must not encourage such thinking. Nostradamus did not predict the future. And the Earth is not flat.
Above all, students must understand that historical facts do exist, e.g. the meticulously planned and executed intentional industrial mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime, known as the Holocaust, did happen; the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas happened and slaves were not treated well by their masters, etc.
Nevertheless, beyond such objective facts, all history is shaped by the political, economic, social, cultural, and personal predicaments in which a person in the past produced a primary source, and by the political, economic, social, cultural, and personal predicaments in which a person later found, selected, translated, and interpreted this primary source, recorded this interpretation, and published it.
Conclusions
Only now may we at long last be able answer the question posed at the beginning.
And there are two answers: A broader and a narrower one.
The Broad Answer
Broadly defined, history is a process through which in the present different people and institutions interpret sources from the past to analyze and make sense of the past and the present. But there is never just one interpretation of the past or just one interpretation of the present.
The different people and institutions who in the present interpret what happened in the past include:
academic historians/history professors; history teachers; protestors and activists, textbook authors; documentarians; museums; public history exhibitors; people who write memoirs, biographies and autobiographies; students of all ages; parents, grandparents and other family members who talk to their children about history; reporters; journalists; writers of historical fiction; novelist whose stories relate to history; movie makers; playwrights; comic book writers and artists; actors; musicians who write lyrics about historical events; all artists whose work relates to history; those who share oral stories about the past or their personal recollections of the past; computer game developers; television producers; hobby historians; talk show hosts; politicians; religious leaders; newscasters; YouTubers; bloggers; and those who post on other social media channels.
This is not an exhaustive list: Many people and institutions interpret the past on a regular basis and do not realize it or are at least not fully aware of it.
However, among all of those mentioned, academic historians (including those who do research and publish history articles and books, and those work in museums, teach history, create documentaries, or curate public history exhibits) are the ones who usually engage with history as a social science in accordance with the ethical standards discussed above.
Hence, their interpretations (which, again, will vary) tend to be the most accurate and instructive. They, too, of course may err or even falsify things. But it is pointless and counterproductive to dismiss an entire academic field because an occasional member might not live up to the standards of the discipline.
One should also not dismiss all the other types of history.
Especially oral history—verbal recollections about a society’s past—often constitutes an important component of how societies see and understand themselves. Historians must not neglect or dismiss such oral traditions.
Yet, especially politicians or people involved in specific political movements have a tendency to interpret the past in such a way that it fits neatly into their political ideology in the present. While this is a version of history that will always exist, it often ends up being so distorted that it has little to do with the work of professional historians.
In the end, “history” defined as a linear narrative of “what happened in the past”—objective and readily discernible to anyone who takes a closer look at it—does not exist.
It is worth mentioning, however, that the desire to recreate past events in the present in the manner in which they actually occurred lies at the roots of modern history research.
It was the goal of the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), whom many consider the founder of the modern academic study of history, to establish through the analysis of primary sources found in archives how “it really was”—“wie es wirklich gewesen”.
(Those familiar with the present-day German language may notice that one would be more likely to say today, “Wie es wirklich war.” or “Wie es wirklich gewesen war.”)
And in many ways, Ranke’s impetus led to the development of the historical profession’s research ethics discussed above, even if Ranke’s “noble dream”, as the US historian Peter Novick has called it, can never come true.
See: Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)
The Narrower Answer
History, more narrowly and arguably more accurately defined, is an academic discipline concerned with understanding all aspects of the past and the present of humankind by way of meticulous research and continuous scholarly exchange and debate. This discipline constantly evolves and changes as historians discover new evidence, propose new interpretations, and apply new research methods.
And this is the history that must be taught in schools.
This has to be an ongoing process in a student’s education.
While one may come up with an accurate definition of what history is in a lesson or two, each student’s entire ensuing time spent in history class must be dedicated to illustrating by way of studying different history topics, which are essentially case studies, how this discipline works, what its problems are, and how students can learn it as a craft and in the process acquire valuable and transferable skills, which I discuss in more detail in the next post.
Why is studying history important?
by Michael Anklin
There are four main reasons why studying history is not only important, but essential.
Generally
1. Studying history helps students understand human society.
2. Studying history teaches students a number of important transferable skills.
3. Studying history teaches students to think in a different way.
4. Studying history teaches empathy.
More precisely
1. Studying history helps students understand human society in the present. It is impossible to do so without a solid understanding of processes in the past that have led—accidentally, as discussed above—to the world in which we live today.
I have explained this to students by comparing today’s world to a painting or a photograph. The present makes up a part of this picture of today’s world, but most of it is made up by what happened in the past. If the latter part is missing, we will never be able to see the whole picture and will thus never be able fully to understand today’s world and how it works.
2. Studying history teaches students a number of important transferable skills, including the ability to think and read critically; think and write analytically; analyze complex issues; interpret and synthesize large amounts of information; apply sound reasoning; construct well-thought-out arguments; and solve problems creatively and innovatively.
3. Studying history teaches students to think in a different way. When studied properly, history helps students understand and appreciate the complexities of human societies and the multifaceted nature of the human condition. In other words, students will learn not to see the world and humankind in black and white, and they will remain intellectually curious and open to new information.
This answer may be particularly helpful when students ask why they need to learn about something that happened long ago and does not affect their everyday lives. Historians know of course that history does profoundly affect our everyday lives. However, sometimes it may be difficult to explain to students how ancient or medieval history affects their lives directly. This is why I often compare history to mathematics.
The connection between mathematics and history may appear nebulous until one considers the following: Students might never again in their lives need to solve certain complicated mathematical problems they have to solve in math class. But studying math trains them to think logically, which is an important skill to have in any profession.
Studying history offers similar benefits. More than any other subject, studying history will teach students to recognize, appreciate, and understand the complexities and nuances of human societies. Just like logical thinking, this is an extremely important skill to acquire.
Knowledge of math can help one figure out what percentage of seats in a legislature different political parties will win in an election. Knowledge of history will prevent one from voting for the wrong party.
4. Sam Wineburg, who is Professor of Education, History, and American Studies at Stanford University, has argued that studying history teaches students empathy: Being able to empathize with people in the past who lived lives so different from their own, helps students empathize with those whom they may think of as different from themselves in the present.
See: Sam Wineburg, “Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts,” The Phi Delta Kappan, 80, 7 (1999), 488-499.
These are the reasons why studying history is important, has always been important, and will always remain important. But studying history is not only important—it is absolutely essential, and it can be a matter of life and death.
I am not being the least bit hyperbolic when I state that without the proper study of its own history, human civilization will eventually cease to exist.
A failure to study history properly has in the twenty-first century already led to a number of dangerous political developments that should have and could have been avoided, had more people been able to think in the manner in which studying history teaches one to think.
History does not repeat
by Michael Anklin
Introduction
One may notice that I do not argue in the post above that one has to study history to avoid repeating past mistakes.
I do not argue this because such a statement will easily conjure up the in my opinion highly problematic assertion that, “if we do not learn from history, it repeats.”
This is a problematic statement for a number of reasons. Those who do not think about this statement any further run the risk of believing that regurgitating it equals critical thinking. It does not. This statement is an empty slogan, unless one investigates it further and qualifies it in a number of ways.
To my knowledge, no famous historian, philosopher or writer has made this claim in isolation exactly in the manner in which it is usually repeated in popular parlance, i.e. “if we don’t learn from history, it repeats.”
Several often humorous or sarcastic reactions to the statement have been recorded. Some writers and thinkers have claimed that history repeats, but have added qualifying statements to the assertion.
Karl Marx’s quip about history repeating the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce is well known. Another example is George Eliot, who wrote in her 1859 novel Janet’s Repentance (an important text in its own right, for it deals with domestic abuse, a subject matter one did not necessarily encounter on a regular basis in the nineteenth century), “History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.” As I argue below, it is more than “a slight change of costume.”
Perhaps the most well-known (and most often misquoted) statement concerning history repeating comes from the Spanish-American novelist, poet, and philosopher George Santayana who wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Notice that Santayana did not write “history”, but “the past.” Let’s look at this statement in its larger context in Santayana’s book The Life of Reason:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason (New York: Scribner’s, 1905), 284.
Needless to say, the racist reference to “savages” is highly problematic, but given that the book was published at the height of New Imperialism in Africa and Asia, not surprising. Indeed, the main concern of this passage speaks to the zeitgeist of that age: A blind faith in the purported superiority of Western culture and technological progress.
Moreover, it appears Santayana was not writing about history repeating, i.e. past events occurring again in the present, at all. He was arguing that if societies as whole were unable to retain useful knowledge and skills, they would stagnate, i.e. repeat the same mistakes over and over instead of learning from them. Hence, he argued, they would keep “repeating the past”.
And it is certainly true, Santayana’s ethnocentric and racist views aside, that if human societies desire to improve the manner in which they organize themselves or want to develop new technologies, they must build on prior knowledge. All human societies do this of course, each in its own way, including those whom Santayana labeled “savages”.
Furthermore, individual human beings must also learn from the past to avoid what Santayana calls “perpetual infancy”. Humans would not be able to grow from infants into functioning adults over time if this were not the case: We make mistakes; we change our approach; we learn; we improve because we do not repeat the mistakes.
In human history, too, there have certainly been times when unfortunate or horrible events, phenomena, or dynamics have in some fashion reoccurred because those responsible for preventing such events did not know or understand that a particular approach taken in the past to deal with something similar had not worked then either. Or they refused to see or admit that it had not worked before.
The similarities between the causes of the worldwide economic recession that started in 2008 and the reasons for the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed it come to mind.
Why history does not repeat
The assertion “if we do not learn from history, it repeats” makes on its own little sense for the following reasons.
The first three reasons concern matters of definition and perhaps semantics:
1. History as I have defined it above in the post “What is history?”, i.e. as an action or a profession in and of the present, rather than timeline of past events, cannot repeat in the manner in which the assertion about history repeating implies.
2. The statement also tends to assume that everybody agrees about what was bad in the past and should therefore not be repeated. Assuming history could repeat, what exactly is not worth repeating? Who decides this? Are there some things some people would want to repeat? Are there some things worth repeating?
3. What does it mean for an event to repeat literally? Is this even possible? A spinning wheel repeats its spins. An event on certain day, during a certain week, year, decade, century, or millennium, cannot constitute a literal repetition of an event on a previous day, during a previous week, year, decade, century, or millennium.
The fourth and the fifth reason are much more important.
4. Even if we accept the initial, incomplete definition of history discussed above— history is “what happened in the past”—history does not repeat.
We must return to Foucault’s aforementioned analysis of Nietzsche’s view of history: An understanding of history as “what happened in the past” assumes that “history” is a linear story of objectively knowable events that occurred in the past.
The claim “if we do not learn from history, it repeats” presupposes that events that took place at certain points on this linear timeline could have been avoided, had people only heeded the lessons learned from previous events in this linear story. With few exceptions, this amounts to a teleological and thus inaccurate view of history.
Most importantly, however, it is dangerous to act in accordance with the statement that history repeats, if one does not learn from it, especially if one does so without qualifying the claim substantially.
5. While we remain on the lookout for signs that we believe may herald the coming repetition of a particularly ghastly event from the past, we a) may miss warning signs of new and different threats to come and/or b) we may end up ill-prepared for something because we expected it literally to repeat instead of to occur in a related but new form.
While we are for example on the lookout to prevent literal World War II era Nazi types from taking over the state, we may miss the increasing acceptance of violence against and hatred of minorities in society. This phenomenon may not help self-identified Nazis come to power, but it may lead to new, possibly equally horrific political criminals taking their place.
Illustrating Reason 5
One of the most instructive examples in this context is the completely unexpected and rapid defeat in 1940 of the French Army at the hands of Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht. Some Americans like to joke that the French simply surrendered at the sight of the more powerful Wehrmacht. Nothing could be further from the truth. The French Army fought tooth and nail. Indeed, until 1940, the French Army was considered among the best armies, possibly the best army, in the world, which made the quick defeat all the more shocking to the French and their allies.
Aside from internal French political squabbles, a key reason for the French Army’s defeat was the fact that France thought it had learned from history and was going to prevent it from repeating.
Expecting a World War I-style attack, the French had built a line of powerful fortresses along the French-German border and France’s border with other countries the Nazis might invade, called the Maginot Line.
The Maginot Line would have been very useful, had the Germans attacked the French the way in which they had attacked them in 1914. But they did not.
Against the German blitzkrieg tactics, in which Stuka dive bombers first blasted any possibly obstacle to the advancing German Army to smithereens to clear a path for fast moving tanks and motorized infantry following behind the planes, the Maginot Line did not stand a chance. This was the case not least because the Germans did not focus their attack on the strongest parts of the line—the bulk of the German Army attacked France through the Ardennes Forest located mainly in Belgium and Luxemburg. Due to its rough terrain, the French had considered the Ardennes Forest impenetrable and had not heavily fortified the border in that area.
The German victory was not a result of the French not learning from history; it was result of the French learning the wrong lesson from history—precisely because they expected history to repeat, and it didn’t.
The German invasion of 1940 was in itself also not a repetition of the 1914 German invasion (unless you consider the very basic fact “Germany invades France” a repetition)—In 1914, the German invasion eventually ground to a halt, resulting in the infamous trench warfare on the Western Front during which neither side managed to gain significant ground until the German Spring Offensive (March–July 1918), and the Allies’ more successful Hundred Days Offensive (August-November 1918) which would lead to the end of the war in November 1918.
In 1940, on the other hand, the Germans rapidly defeated the French Army, conquered Paris, and occupied half and later all of France. This was not a repetition of 1914.
But it happened exactly because the French thought they had learned from history how to defend themselves against the Germans but had not taken into consideration that warfare had changed dramatically since 1914.
Rugged forests are no obstacles for fighter planes. It was also not the first time the Germans had successfully used their blitzkrieg tactics. Prior to the invasion of France, Germany had attacked and occupied Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Poland. And even before the 1939 invasion of Poland, Germany had practiced its blitzkrieg in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), its horrible consequences commemorated in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting, Guernica.
Yet, France decided to focus on old threats at the expense of preparing for new and different perils.
It may be worth pointing out in this context that Charles de Gaulle, who would become the leader of the Free French government in exile, had already in his writings in the 1920s conceptualized what would later be called blitzkrieg tactics and published his theories in his 1933 book Vers l’Armée de métier (Toward a Professional Army). It is not clear whether German General Heinz Guderian, who was one of the principal strategists behind the German version, had read De Gaulle’s text. It appears quite certain, however, that the French high command had not read or taken into consideration De Gaulle’s suggestions.
Conclusion
Certain dynamics, patterns, phenomena, etc. that occurred at a certain point in the past may occur again in a similar form in the present. But if we are going to learn from history by avoiding past mistakes, we must learn the right lessons, and be fully aware that virtually no past event will ever take place again in the present in the same exact way.
Hence, it is possible to learn from history to avoid repeating past mistakes, but only if one takes into consideration what “history” actually is (as discussed above), and only if one keeps in mind that while certain patterns might indeed repeat, no past event or phenomenon will ever literally repeat, and that, therefore, one most remain vigilant and recognize new manifestations of old threats that might arise but might not be recognized as the same or similar threat because they do not appear to be the same. Thus, instead of looking for the proverbial goose-stepping Nazis or 1920s-style Italian Fascists, one most recognize anti-democratic patterns when they emerge and anti-democratic language and actions when they increase.
We may in this context want to quote Foucault’s analysis of Nietzsche’s writings on history again:
“Effective” history…deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations. An event, consequently, is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked “other”.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 88.
In other words, there will never be another Hitler, but if a “reversal of a relationship of forces,” as Foucault put it, threatens democratic institutions, someone similar to Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin may very well come to power—but we just might miss it because we keep looking for that Chaplin mustache. Once we realize that “it” has happened again, but in a different way, it may already be too late to stop it.
An excellent guide to what kinds of dynamics one should look out for is Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s short book On Tyranny: Twenty Lesson from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017).
The first line in the book is significant: “History does not repeat, but it does instruct.” That is, we do not need to study history to keep it from repeating. We need to study history to understand how humankind—and in this case, human tyranny in particular— operates, in order to prevent new tyrannical regimes from emerging.
Snyder calls the reader’s attention to patterns and phenomena one must look for, rather than any literal repetition of past events.
As such, one will most likely learn more about preventing tyranny from reading Snyder’s book than from countless hours of watching documentaries about the Nazis, reading popular history books, and continuing to insist that “if we do not learn from history, it repeats”.
On Tyranny is quite short and written for a general audience; it should be taught in secondary schools around the world.